The Hook-Up

Violet T. Barry, who is the President of one of my sister websites, Holy Jamz, submitted this article to me, and I thought it was very powerful. Read on and let me know what you think:

When I was 19, I let one of my friends introduce me to a guy who she knew through association as one of her boyfriend's closest friends. When we met, it started off really sweet for a moment. Everything was going pretty nicely until he started talking about sex. After that first conversation, every conversation eventually led to the same topic which eventually turned into him pursuing me. So I lost my cool one day and told him to lose my number and pretend as if we never met.

A few weeks after that conversation, I got a page from him from out of the blue. Within that same hour I started receiving 911 pages from different telephone numbers. By the time I pulled up to my house from school I called the last number back and it was my friend who was crying and begging me to go and get her. I asked her where she was and I jumped in the car and took off. When I reached her and got her safely inside of the car, she told me that her ex-boyfriend (who set me up with the guy I told never to call me again) stopped by her family's house and asked her to go for a ride with him. She agreed and he took her to a gated apartment complex that you could only get in and out of with a key.

She told him that she'd rather wait in the car but he insisted that she went up with him because he was going to be a while. Eventually after going back and forth, she agreed. He had her step into the apartment first and closed and locked the door behind him. The apartment was full of guys. And everyone was staring at her. After that sentence the rest of the events from that moment on was a blur. The guy that I had been talking to was also in that apartment. As far as she can remember, her ex-boyfriend took her into a bedroom and raped her. After that, the guy I had been talking to entered the room and she only remembers running and screaming. After that, she can't recall how she got her clothes back on. She remembered running through the apartment complex and trying to jump the high concrete wall to get out. She never really understood how she made all the way to where she was when I picked her up.

At the time, she refused to call the police or to go to the rape trauma center. It was after taking her to another friend's place and talking with her and her husband that she agreed to go to the emergency room. We were told to go to the trauma rape center where she was examined by nurses and coaxed into speaking with a police officer to take a statement. She asked me to stay with her and I did.

It was then that I learned that she didn't really know the guy that she called her boyfriend. They had been dating for less than a month and she only knew him by his street name and the vehicle that he drove. She did not know of either his real first or last name, where he stayed, his home telephone number or anything. She basically knew jack about this dude and was sexually active with him from jump. The police never bothered to follow-up on the incident and she decided to put it behind her and pretend as if it never happened. We never spoke about it again but I never fully understood why things went down the way that they did.

I learned that I was set-up to be gang raped along with my friend that night but didn't. I learned that I really did not know my friend the way that I thought I did. I learned that it was best that I make my own mistakes and that it was better for me not to follow or allow people that I knew to influence me into making poor decisions. My heart went out to my friend for what she had survived that night. At the same time, I also realized that it could have also been me and that she had led me falsely into dating one of her rapists by telling me that she had been with her boyfriend for a long time and knew his friend, too.

I could say that the experience kept me on my toes and from going on to make more mistakes and bad decisions but I would be a liar. I was one of those people who had to learn things the hard way for quite some time before coming to any kind of common sense. When I look back at some of the things that I've done in my younger years, I know that it was nothing but the grace of God that spared, kept and saved me even in the midst of some of the worse choices I've ever made and in the midst of some of the darkest periods of my life. As women, if we can not love ourselves and be content in knowing that the Lord loves us and cares for us regardless of what we may think or feel for ourselves, happiness will never be found in bed with some man between our thighs for whatever amount of minutes or hours the sin of lust can last.

If you've tried everything else imaginable in your life, why not give Christ a try?

Why not, indeed? Have you ever experienced anything like this or heard of anything like this happening to anybody else? What kind of vetting process do you think you need to put your potential boyfriend through to make sure it doesn't happen to you? Hopefully, this article will make us all be just a little more careful about who we choose to spend our time with.


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